Occupy Wall Street

There is this thing going on.  In downtown/ midtown/ uptown Manhattan.  A lot of people are voicing their dismay at how the government isn't our government and how our interests aren't being looked after in any way contiguous with the democratic process in which we try to participate.  People are being corralled, pepper sprayed, pummeled and forgotten. And unless you live in certain foreign countries or have a Facebook or Twitter friend who is following the events, you wouldn't know it was happening.  Mostly because no one is reporting it. Which, honestly, is flabbergasting.  Suffice to say, people are speaking their minds peacefully and orderly, in the best tradition of a democratic union, and they are being persecuted for it.  In New York.  U.S.A.  2011. 
So yeah, good luck to all of us, with that.

Last Call

So, so much more in the works.  Stay tuned.
"In life there are weirdos and assholes.  I'd rather fraternize with the weirdos."

The End of an Era

"Sentimental in the Shorey

Hello friends
After 4 years of good times and shenanigans down on River St. we'll be closing our doors tomorrow September 29th at 8pm.
Swing buy to say one last goodbye to our beloved little space before it becomes a pile of rubble and a memory.
WE'LL HAVE A LAST HOORAH PIZZA PARTY AND BEERS TOMORROW, THURSDAY AT 7PM
We will be reopening at our NEW LOCATION in late October / early November
located at 68 North 3rd St. Williamsburg Brooklyn. (Corner of North 3rd and Wythe Ave)
Keep checking our blog for updates on our renovation and opening day...and of course our grand opening party!
For any inquiries or questions we can still be reached at our email address. mollusknyc@gmail.com
Thanks to all of you for your amazing friendship and continued support! We'll miss you Monster Island!
Keep it Hard Body!"

Facebook Surfing

Facebook is the stuff of nearly universal reproach.  Sheepishly acquiesced to by nearly all comers, the social networking site is a bittersweet guilty pleasure at best, begrudging necessity at worst,  in our interconnected world, both useless and surprising.  Today offered up the work of Christa Padova from the QSPro Long Beach blur.  Enjoy.

Today's Thought

Wifey's 36th Birthday

Today's Other, Spookier Thought

Here
(yes, this is a touch Yahoo News-worthy, but it's just too weird.)

Today's Thought

Slo Mo! Speed Ramps! Pumping Music! Blam!

Guys With Machines Making Highlight Recap Pornography.

Christopher Hitchens debates Barry Brummett

White Wash

Peoples Of The Indies

via Bukit Bear
“…the idea that freedom can be a real thing…today in the 20^thcentury…and for people who’s skins are brown..”

Jonathan Clay

via QPs

Ah, Winter.

Two Alternative Scenarios: 1. Wake up long before dawn, drive 30-45 minutes to the beach before sunrise, take the requisite ten minutes to fit into your 6mil suit, haul your board off the car, paddle out to the break as a hopefully hazy sun fuzzes through the grey clouds, check your watch after three minutes in the water, paddle in, take the requisite twenty minutes to pry yourself out of your 6mil wetsuit, stress out through an hour and fifteen minutes of traffic to get home just in time for your wife and child to give you the evil eye as you rush your boy to school, late again. 2. Wake up long before dawn, look down at your crappy two-wheel-drive 1993 toyotondabishi piece of junk covered in a six foot high snow drift thanks to the snow plow, go back to sleep.

"So dope. Real NYC."

 via A.Lopez

One Beach Film

Check out Barefoot Wine's Facebook page tonight at 6pm. Tyler Breuer will be doing a live Q&A with Filmmaker Jason Baffa and other incredible artists discussing Barefoot Wine's latest film One Beach.

Dawn Parole

The external excitements are dying fast.  The World Tour blew through, leaving a wake of happy vibes thanks to the down-graded event schedule and up-graded swell schedule, with an emphasis on surfing the quality waves on offer as opposed to the hoopla of some ollie mctwisty set to bad punk infused hip hop.  An unplanned readjustment of priorities that fit hand in glove.  The summer surfy crowds are slowly dragging themselves back to the city, putting their new boards on new racks and closeting their spring suits, awaiting that planned trip to Costa Azula over winter holiday.  The sun is rising later, bringing the annual reassessment of morning duties.  Some fed up pseudo-local just reiterated for the twentieth time in the last week their customary rant about tourists and kooks and the Hampton crowd and SUPers and whatever else happened to piss them off over the warmer months that they spent participating in the crowding of their own line up. Antonio and I are restarting our own seasonal arguments about the quickest surface street route back to the city in rush hour traffic.  Everyone is getting back in wetsuits.  Everyone is getting back to the deal with the devil. Everything is getting back to how it is for most of the time for most New York surfers.  

Surfrider! Yaow! (A Short Photo Essay)

1. Ruth (& Sunny) held the party together with a potent mix of cornflakes and peanut butter.
2. Mr. Brisick being filmed for the upcoming reality T.V. series "Surf Balls with Jamie B."
3. Yata danced, bedeviled knee be damned.
4. Wonder Twin Powers activate!
5. Form of nostrils!
6. Form of Kenyu-san!
7. "Best In Show"

Another Yes.

Via Noah Sabich...here.

Yes.

Jojo Playing in Brooklyn

I remember the first time I listened to Jonathan Richman.  Must have been around 1992. I couldn't believe what I had lucked into.  I couldn't believe a guy like this existed.  Someone who could bottle up the weird, spastic childish energy I had, someone who could channel some bizarre combination of Gertrude Stein, Trader Vic's, Serge Gainsbourg and The Velvet Underground.  As Wifey once pointed out, "That's the best bad French singing I've ever heard." I could say that Jonathan Richman was a key external synthesizer in my life.  Outside perhaps Fishbone, the English Beat, The Kinks, Dire Straits, John Coltrane and Fleetwood Mac, there has been no other act so instrumental in codifying my musical proclivities. And I hate admitting to things like that.   If you get a chance, take a chance. 


Jonathan Richman has been writing songs, making records and performing live for most of his life, winning fans and making friends around the world with his guileless honesty and playfully catchy compositions. He's revered by countless fellow artists, and has built a remarkably loyal international audience through his tireless touring. His deceptively straightforward songs embody timeless qualities of humanity, optimism, emotional insight and a boundless sense of humor, untainted by cynicism or transient notions of hipness. The records that Jonathan Richman has made over the past 30 years have long held a special place in the hearts of his fans. He began playing guitar at the age of 15, and in the early 1970s formed the Modern Lovers, whose raw, minimalist sound and emotionally forthright songs helped to lay the groundwork for punk rock. But by the time the group's landmark debut album (including the much-covered "Road Runner," a Top Five single in Europe) was released in 1976, Jonathan had already moved on to a quieter sound and a gentler lyrical focus. Since then, he's continued to record and tour prolifically, first with a series of Modern Lovers lineups, later on his own, and eventually as a duo with drummer Tommy Larkins. Over the years, Jonathan's music has absorbed a multitude of influences, from doo-wop to country to a variety of international styles, without sacrificing the artist's effervescent personality. Jonathan's fans have remained fiercely devoted over the years, and his audience expanded substantially in the 1990s, thanks to his frequent guest spots on TV's Late Night with Conan O'Brien, his prominent appearance in the 1998 film comedy smash There's Something About Mary, and the inclusions of his Modern Lovers classics "Ice Cream Man" and "I'm A Little Airplane" on Sesame Street. For much of his career, Jonathan has toured almost almost nonstop around the world. "Traveling and playing for new people in new places is one of my favorite things," he notes. "It's great playing places that are off the beaten track. You can learn a lot when you play in a little town in Holland or Western Australia, and you learn different things than you would learn playing a big city. This year we're going to try to play in Extremadura, which is the southwest of Spain--we might become the first American entertainers ever to play there. I'm hoping that we can able to play the Canary Islands soon. "Playing shows and making records keeps been getting easier and more fun," Jonathan states, adding, "Me and Tommy play totally different than we played two years ago. We already play a different style than we played on that live DVD, and the way we played then was totally different from the way we played three years before that. I still feel like we're just starting out, and I still learn new stuff every night."

There will be no opening act.

Reminder! Tomorrow Night, Big Happening.

Info Here.

Today's Thought

El Mar, Mi Alma

Hilarious

This Just In...

Quicksilver Pro Long Beach New York gets surfable waves. Kelly Slater loses final in head high, fun-looking waves to some Aussie guy. Everyone is well satisfied. I haven't eaten lunch.

Yesterday and today, from the relative comfort of my office, I watched, or rather caught out of the corner of my ear, the happenings not a couple handful of miles to the east of me.  Not being a surf contest junky of even a mild sort, in fact having only watched two real live surf contests before this one (and both those streaming over the internet) it was interesting to see what passes as cutting edge, scorable surfing.  I saw some amazing things.  I saw some boring things.  I saw guys doing things on the wavs I usually surf that I'd never seen anyone do on the waves I usually surf. And then I saw a heap load of more boring things.  Both ways, there is a little sigh of relief that the waves cames through, at lest for a couple days.  Tee Koh Luh, doing his thing.  A moment of K. Slater doing his thing.

'Shadows' playing tomorrow night

Tonight. Quicksilver Party In Brooklyn.

Ruth, Ty, Dave, Marina, Biz, Dustin, Erin, The Dooch, Jah Bless, Bubbie, Johnny HA! (and a couple of the nicest guys you'd ever meet), Sara, Carmel, The Other John, Jamie, The Other Tyler, Maiko, Shigeru,  That One Guy Who's Name I Always Forget, That One Girl Who's Name I Always Forget, Three People Who's Name I Remember But Are Forgetting To Mention, One Person Who's Name I Remembered At The Time But Forget Now, Moose, A Bunch Of People With Faces I've Seen Before and a handful of people who looked like surfers, pro-surfers, ex-pro-surfers, hangers-on-surfers and non surfers.  Fun for 45 minutes! Make that an hour!  Babysitter calls!

Big Ups Thanks! to C.Trejo for providing the epic video documentations

The New Yorker

There are a few things every red-blooded, elite, liberal, wannabe intellectual New Yorker dreams of including on their life's resume.  Among them has to be the inclusion, somehow, in The New Yorker.  This week I realized that dream by being in the right place at the right time, holding the right photographer's kid. And there you have it, image #8.  The fact is, I was sitting on a couch next to Joe Namath when the second tower fell.  He was in the studio I was working at, recording a voice-over for Ben Gay that morning.  I don't know where he went after that, but I packed up my things, grabbed the Godfather, met wifey (who was luckily working only blocks away) and walked the sixty some odd blocks home, past dust covered survivors, kids acting like it was a holiday and just about every other sort of New Yorker you could imagine who had taken to the street.  Which was just about everyone. For the next week, we watched the smoke and dust rise and carry over South Brooklyn.  A very fresh memory indeed.  This photo actually says a whole lot.

Happening

The Other Side of Irene

via Tommy Colla

The hard effects of Irene are still being felt further inland.   A lot of people lost their land and some lost their lives.  It's hard to account, mentally, for the devastation when one's own little bubble was so unaffected.  In NYC, we barely felt it.

Recently

Recently I tried to kick the coffee habit I picked up when my son was born.  Shifting to a morning ration of green tea, I figured the coffee might be bad for my heart, or no good for my heart, and maybe just puts me on edge.  The experiment didn't really pan out. Our espresso machine is on the fritz though, and I've been negligent about getting it fixed, so I've been getting my coffee down the street at one of the innumerable coffee places that grace the neighborhood.  The choice being made at the meeting of where my wife-likes-to-get-coffee and the-earliest-opening-coffee-shop. This morning I found out one of the shop guys is playing music at Southpaw on Thursday.  I've never heard his music, but they are always playing good stuff over the speakers there, and he just looks like he'd make good music.  Besides, I like the flier artwork.
Also recently, I've been getting some really ridiculously nice feedback on the Lapsed Catholics film. That Tyler Breuer interview is something that would make my head too big if the people who deal with me on a regular basis weren't so talented at quotidian deflating.  In the good way.  Ku-Yah and Wheels On Toast have also pointed to the film recently.  I'll tell you what, when you're not feeling totally solid, having someone mention that they think you've done something solid at any point has a buoyant effect. 
We've not been able to take part in any professional surfer watching so far.  But it looks like there is swell happening in the water.  So it might not be a totally un-fun thing to do at some point in the coming week.

Today's Thought

via Szipvurm Unt Vibbul

I just really love how this plays out

Ty Breuer Speaks!

Tyler Breuer is one of the most honest, trustworthy individuals I've come across.

Click on the pic...

An After Thought

QS LB Pro Looking Possibly Surfable?

It's that time of year where we post lots of images of swirly white things against a smattering of blue and green.  It is also the time of year when we contemplate committing career suicide.  It is also, now the time of of year when this sort of thing apparently happens.

Surf Art By Any Other Name

Janie Belcourt

Buenos Dias: Trunker Shows & Video Players

Clear All